I thought I had a backup. I use the Gdrive add-on and it should have had a backup.
I didn’t have a backup.
Turns out when I moved from a Pi to Proxmox I didn’t set Gdrive add-on up properly, so it wasn’t making backups every 3 days like it always has.
Then I killed Proxmox. No idea what I did to kill it, I just tried to make my NAS VM have 4gb ram all the time instead of Ballooning from 1gb, and it never booted again.
So I had to start fresh. But while I’ve only been playing with VMs for a couple months my HA instance has been a work of love since Lockdowns and COVID times.
And now I’m starting again.
Now go and check your backup solution.
A painful lesson to be sure, but also perhaps an opportunity to spruce up or rethink some of those original automations and integrations. I’ve been messing with my own rig since the lockdowns and while it’s not exactly a mess, per se, I certainly know more now than I did then. Refactoring your code is rarely a spontaneous activity.
Also, I’m checking now and oops, syncing backups off-box broke thanks for prompting me to check!
Yes indeed, I am trying to revamp a little. It’s slow work (because I’m trying to get a bunch of VMs running not just HA, we have Plex running again!) but so far I haven’t even installed Node Red yet, and it’s where I did all my automations.
So my Motion Sensor lights are all running in HA now rather than Node Red and seem to be ok. I haven’t had a complaint that the bathroom lights have cut out on anyone yet, and that happened occasionally before.
Glad I’ve prompted you and you’ve found your backup lacking, that was the plan
A month later and I have to say my automations are so much cleaner!
I started using HA’s automation engine just to have a go. I bought some ESP32 sensors and set up ESPresence and thought it was time to reinstall Node Red.
What I’ve done is just made a presence page for all the complicated logic, then separate pages for rooms and automations.
So my Front room gets quite complicated so it has it’s own page but hallways just require motion sensing and maybe illuminance, so there’s just a Hallways page.
I’ve also discovered how to make Binary Sensors in Node Red so I’ve less need for all the Input Booleans I once used.
I’m a week in to having an espresence node on each of my 4 floors and it’s just really useful. Motion sensor stopped tracking motion? Well is someone still on that floor? Yeah? Don’t turn the lights off then…
I’m currently moving my HA automations back in to node red and there’s some bugs when I forget to turn off the HA counterpart, but that will go as I clear out the automations.